Sauron Will Be Like Walter White, Tony Soprano And The Joker

The Rings Of Power’s first season has finally come to an end, after eight episodes, a host of mystery boxes and some big reveals in the Season 1 finale.

You can read my review of the finale right here.

Spoilers ahead.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay discuss the first season, the big reveal of Sauron in the season finale, and what to expect from the show’s arch-villain in Season 2.

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It’s quite the read, I have to admit, with the show’s creators likening their Sauron twist to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and dropping references to Romeo & Juliette, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and casting Sauron as an antihero similar to Tony Soprano or Walter White.

This all strikes me as a little much for a show that is, at its best, a very pretty piece of fan-fiction and at its worse a wildly bungled screen adaptation of Tolkien’s Second Age.

In last night’s finale, Halbrand was revealed to be Sauron all along. This was something that many of us saw coming but hoped would not be the case. After all, Galadriel and Halbrand meet in the middle of the ocean in what can only be described as a wild coincidence, and any writer worth their salt knows that wild coincidences typically do not make for great stories. Worse, Galadriel—one of the eldest and wisest of elves—is thoroughly duped by Sauron’s deception until the very last minute, which makes the show’s central protagonist look even worse than she already did.

So why did they take this path?

“We felt Sauron should be a character in his own right,” McKay says. “We wanted to study the currents running within him in a way that hopefully would reward audiences as they follow him moving forward as he becomes the Dark Lord. You now know him as a person outside the name ‘Sauron.’ In some ways, we wanted to do an origin story for Sauron. We didn’t want to make a show that was about the hunt for Sauron, but we love the idea of Sauron as a deceiver who could, hopefully, deceive some of the audience”

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““There’s something that Milton does in Paradise Lost that we talked about a lot,” says Payne. “Where he makes Satan a really compelling character. In some ways, he’s the first antihero where he’s compelling and you can’t take your eyes off of him. Milton did that on purpose because he wants you to fall along with Adam and Eve. He wants Satan to be so persuasive that he also seduces [the reader] and you’re unconsciously won over, so that you perceive your own fallenness and your need for redemption.

“In Tolkien, Sauron is a deceiver and we know that in Second Age he appears in ‘fair form.’ So what if he sneaks up on you and is able to get you to sympathize with him and get you to be on board with him so that once you actually realize who he is, that he’s already got his hooks in you? So it’s not just as easy as, ‘This person is evil, I’m going to back away,’ because you’ve already formed some level of attachment to him. What if we could get the audience to go through a similar journey?”

In theory, this doesn’t bother me at all. But the show would have needed to focus on Halbrand a great deal more to pull it off in Season 1. Halbrand was just one of a huge cast of characters, and his true identity as Sauron was telegraphed too early on. The entire plotline about him being the King of the Southlands felt forced and contrived. He needed to be introduced in a more organic and less coincidental way. He should have been a more heroic figure who the audience truly grew to love—if the plan was to trick us (and somehow Galadriel) into falling for him.

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Oddly, Payne says that they didn’t want the reveal to be a total surprise but rather confirmation of a “sneaking suspicion.” He notes that “There’s a reason people are still putting on Romeo and Juliet hundreds of years after it was written even though you know what happens at the end. A surprise only rewards you on one viewing.”

What I find remarkable about this statement is that the first season of The Rings Of Power relies almost entirely on surprises. They set up numerous mystery boxes—who is the Stranger? Who is Sauron? What are the dwarves hiding? What is the sword hilt for?—and then give us one ‘shocking’ reveal after another. Mount Doom. The Balrog. Sauron. It seems that the entire season was written with surprises in mind.

On Galadriel, Payne says: “Season one opens with: Who is Galadriel? Where did she come from? What did she suffer? Why is she driven?” But I’m not sure these questions were answered in a particularly satisfactory way, so when he goes on to say that Season 2 will do “the same thing with Sauron” I am not filled with a great deal of hope.

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“Sauron can now just be Sauron,” McKay adds. “Like Tony Soprano or Walter White. He’s evil, but complexly evil. We felt like if we did that in season one, he’d overshadow everything else. So the first season is like Batman Begins, and the The Dark Knight is the next movie, with Sauron maneuvering out in the open.”

Here I can only chuckle. Sauron will be like Tony Soprano, the sociopathic mobster from one of TV’s most lauded programs, The Sopranos? He will also be like the sociopathic, arrogant genius Walter White from Breaking Bad, widely regarded as the best TV show ever made? Oh, and like the Joker from Christopher Nolan’s much-praised Batman movies, widely considered some of the best superhero movies ever made?

What can I say? This strikes me as self-aggrandizement by association. The Rings Of Power is neither a faithful rendition of Tolkien nor in the same league as Milton, Shakespeare, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad or The Dark Knight. This season has not been a deep character study of any of its characters, and has spent far too much time on tertiary and ultimately unimportant figures like Bronwyn and Theo to have been a real examination of Halbrand/Sauron (let alone Galadriel).

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Oh well. I know many people enjoyed it. I am unfortunately not among their ranks. I have made a video about this as well, which you can watch below:

Read the full THR interview here.

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Read my review of the Season 1 finale here.